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Exterior of the ITC Sonar, Kolkata, the first hotel in the world to receive Carbon Credits.

As a group, ITC hotels division has forged a path with their sustained efforts to go green, a vision that has resulted in a hat-trick to celebrate – with ITC Royal Gardenia being Asia’s first hotel to receive a Leed platinum rating, ITC Maurya being the first hotel in the world to be rated as a Leed Platinum rating for an existing building, and ITC Sonar being the first hotel in the world to receive carbon credits.

Hotelier India speaks with Nakul Anand, executive director ITC, about the efforts that went into achieving these fantastic results.

While it’s a given that the hotel industry in India is booming as a business, there are few who have managed to make a mark quite like the ITC Hotels group has.

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From being pioneers in blending sheer luxury with eco-consciousness, to winning accolades for their service standards, it’s hard to find fault with the gentle giant.

At the helm of this organisation is the equally gentle Nakul Anand. His three-decade-long career with ITC has seen him cross many landmarks such as being the group’s youngest manager, then GM, and now its youngest director.

In his fifties, Anand has successfully introduced Six Sigma quality standards and initiated some very innovative concepts in hoteliering. Articulate, soft spoken and modest to the core, it’s difficult to catch Anand not thinking about work.

Commenting on ITC’s green initiatives, he says, “Hotels have a comparatively lesser damaging effect on the environment than many other industries.

Nevertheless they present an excellent platform to spread the green message in terms of the number of people they employ and through whom they can spread the message.”

He mentions that it was in fact, crucial to the whole exercise that employees were educated and trained about what the hotel’s objective was; there was a need to create awareness about efforts to draw sincere cooperation from them, whether in waste management or saving water.

“A substantial amount of training had to be done so that our associates were made aware. Our concern was to continuously talk to them so that our green initiatives become a belief and not empty rituals that they have to perform,” says Anand.

Ask him about the costs involved and he replies, “I would imagine the project costs to be anywhere between 20-30% higher, but the returns are yet to be seen. My message to people is to invest now and get the returns later.”